After attending an exhibition, I ended up with 50 business cards! Here comes a problem.

All (or most) of them are good contacts that I would like to save to a spreadsheet. And so I searched for an app/service that can help me. I ended up with shoeboxed, with is probably good, but cost $0.20 a card. Not satisfied, I looked around for a free solution.. My conclusion is that it is either paid, or not good.

However, I come up with my own quick & free solution, using a couple of free technologies :)

Steps to digitize all your business cards

1) Use CardMunch to scan all the namecards with an iPhone. Also go to iPhone Settings > CardMunch > and enable contacts auto save. As each namecard is scanned and processed (takes a couple of minutes), they will be automatically saved to the iPhone.

2) Enable iCloud for syncing the iPhone contacts. This is to auto sync the contacts between iPhone and a Mac.

3) Open Mac Address Book and search for “Scanned on…”. This will filter the contacts that were added by CardMunch! Select these contacts and export in vcf.

4) Convert the vcf to csv using http://labs.brotherli.ch/vcfconvert/.

5) Open the csv file with Microsoft Excel or Google Spreadsheet!

You may also clean up your iPhone contacts by deleting away those contacts from Mac Address Book :)

This is the power of CardMunch and iCloud!

I read from problogger on writing good headlines for your blog post, and thought it is worth sharing.

Instead of always writing your headline in usual plain ways, follow these rules to get your readers excited. These are the 4 proven styles.

1. Intrigue Style

Intrigue readers by making them think “how can that be possible??” or “what is this stuff about??”.

eg. “Learn How to Develop Facebook Platform in a Day”

2. Finality Style

This usually consist of the words “The Ultimate Guide to …” or “The Secret Guide …”

eg. “The Ultimate Guide to Android Programming”

3. Topic + Hype Style

Add hype to your topic statement.

Eg. “iOS Development Guide: Earn Your First Million Dollar”

4. List Style

This includes a number in the title.

Eg. “4 Headlines to Get Readers Excited” :) 

There are 10 ways to think like Bill Gates:

1. Prioritize
2. Ask smarter questions
   
3. Make data-driven decisions.
   
4. Divorce your ego
   
5. Frame the problem
   
6. Get perspectives on the problem
   
7. Model the problem
   
8. Think of the system and the ecosystem
   
9. Think of the problem over time
   
10. Think strategically
    

This Bill Gate’s thinking framework is further elaborated on Sources of Insight. Another alternative framework would be the six hats way.

With Steve Jobs:

Without:

I can give you an invite to Quora. Just leave a message with your email in the comments. Go here, or simply enter you email below:

I used to think that Quora invite is hard to get, because I have never been invited by anyone. I was wrong. A Quora account can invite as many friends. So I think I never got an invite is just because it is not popular enough. Ah, I got mine because I asked, and I was easily given.

In my opinion, I would say Quora is a great question-and-answer web service. I find it useful for asking good questions. If you have an account, please follow me :)

Slideshare does support all fonts – including custom fonts that you download.

I was told that the slides only support certain standard fonts, but I wasn’t satisfied with the answer, and so I created a slide to verify. The result is:

As you can see, all fonts are shown!

If you have time, take a look and comment on teh presentation I’m currently working on.

Statistics in the past 12 months:

Clearly, IE is dropping with less than 40% market share.

So dear Singapore government, please improve your sucky websites.

PaC@Gov is a government website for 200,000 Singapore servants to view their pay slips and submit claims.

It is of course a very important website to so many Singapore servants. Yet, the website sucks.

Here is why:

• It is best viewed with IE6, a web browser technology 10 years ago!
• It claims to support IE6 and above, but it definitely does not support the latest IE9.
  See my screenshot below on how messed up the website is.
• It does NOT support Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari and Google Chrome!
  That means it is not supporting more than 50% of web users.
• The website is totally unfriendly. It took me (an experience web user) 10 attempts to submit a simple claim.

Screenshot: Screwed-up button in IE9

It needs big change, and big progress. It is such a shame to be a government website.

PaC@Gov, please find a better IT vendor. Please don’t use back NCS.

Disclaimer: I am not working for the Government, and doesn’t need to use PaC@Gov. I wrote this post because I tried to help a teacher to submit her claim. I even attempt to change its CSS to get back the “Make Claim” button, but failed. I was very disappointed with the website so I felt a need to grumble here.

If you are a user of PaC@Gov Website, and has a comment, please leave it below. 

In case you are wondering if you need to pay $29.99 for every Mac that you own, you don’t.

Purchase a single copy using the same iTunes account, and all your authorized Macs would be able to install. This was actually mentioned in WWDC 2011 keynote.

So, go Mac App Store and download Lion now!

I encountered an error from my Mail client, a couple of times. The error message is

Error from Mail client: "Web login required: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=78754 (Failure)"

I am not exactly sure what is causing the error to my Mac Mail client. But I do know how to fix it by unlocking captcha.

To fix, you have to go to https://www.google.com/accounts/b/0/DisplayUnlockCaptcha, enter your email address and password (works for enterprise app too), and it will miraculously solve the error.

Note: If you will to go to http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=78754, it will ask you to go to https://www.google.com/a/yourdomain.com/UnlockCaptcha. That link somehow doesn’t work.